Ferrum Technology Services Blog

There are numerous industries that, in one way or another, deal with sensitive data on the regular. In order to protect this data, numerous laws, regulations, and other requirements have been put on the books that require businesses to maintain—as well as prove—their compliance to them.

Today, we wanted to focus on how a business would prove their compliance, so we’re going to dive into the subject of compliance reporting.

Let’s face it… “government” and “innovation” aren’t usually associated with one another. Despite the finances that these organizations have, these funds are generally spoken for (on top of not always being used as efficiently as they could be). However, some government operations have started embracing cloud services, which has led to benefits for their entire communities.

Do you remember the series of high-profile infrastructure attacks that occurred not so long ago this year? Well, now the United States government is taking matters into its own hands by ordering the patching of various vulnerabilities in affected systems. It’s a massive effort to thwart hackers and other cyberthreats from taking root in vulnerable systems.

Every IT administrator today needs to be concerned about cybersecurity, as does every private business when it comes to its network. However, the same can’t really be said for the computing resources of the government and other public entities… simply due to the lack of talent available.

Huawei is one of the biggest technology companies in the world, employing over 200,000 people and accruing more than $100 billion in annual revenue without being a major player in the hungry U.S. market. As impressive as these numbers are, the Chinese company is staring at a very troubling situation in the face.

Some people believe so much in something that they’ll commit their lives to make it better for everyone. The Internet, as one of the most impressive advancements of civilization, has a fair amount of people who take the time (or make a living) advocating on the various issues that face Internet users. These Internet rights advocates have begun to make a big difference on the way that businesses, especially those businesses that only exist on the Internet, can act. Today, we’ll take a look at Internet advocacy.

December 14th is the last day that our government representatives can vote whether or not to continue the Internet’s protection under the net neutrality rules established in 2015. Without these rules in place, your data can be analyzed by your Internet service provider, and they are free to act on that knowledge and manipulate your Internet in support of their own interests.

Since the very beginning of the year, over 10 million personal records have been lost or stolen on a daily basis. As a result, chances are high that you or someone you know has been victimized by a data breach. However, since many individuals and businesses are never notified, they may have incorrectly come to the conclusion that they are not at risk. This, unfortunately, is not the case.

Last year’s United States’ tax season when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was breached and hackers used 464,000 stolen Social Security numbers to successfully E-file 101,000 fraudulent tax returns using false PINs. This incident should cause taxpayers to ask the question, “What’s the government doing to protect my tax returns?”

As a side effect of a recent federal ruling, loaning out your Netflix password to your pal so they can catch up on Orange is the New Black is now considered a federal offense.

Just like any other high-profile entity, a government should place great emphasis on its IT infrastructure. The U.S. government is moving through 2015 with an increased awareness of the state of cybersecurity, and with all of the huge security breaches that happen almost regularly, it qualifies cyber threats as important as other national security threats.